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It's hard to get character growth and plot development without what is being called universe shrinkage.
In theory it would be possible to do a feature length single tracking shot set in the Star Wars universe where no character appears more than 5 seconds.
It might even be possible to tell a story that way but you would have zero character development.
In real life there are about 7 billion unfolding individual character stories, most films center on about one billionth of that number and primarily focus on three people (the protagonist, the antagonist and the love interest).
In a sense mentioning a character like Dyas or Fluious and not developing their story beyond a brief mention is character shrinkage which in my book is worse than shrinking the number of named environments.
I recently got round to finally watching Guardians of the Galaxy... yes I'm high on believing... The central characters are richer than average, exactly the sort of thing we want from a Star Wars film (If only the PT was made that way) however there was also enough detail added to the minor characters to make the viewer feel that if the 'plotlight' was shone on them instead they too could carry a story.
In the PT we had a rather dull roster of main characters but that was compounded by the 'appear here as a means to sell an action figure' place-mat minor characters, like Tion Medon who looks great but we know nothing about him and Dyas who is mentioned in passing and was almost certainly meant to be an awful pun pseudonym for Sidious. These are hinted as part of something we should know about but are just skipped over.
Sure in ESB the bounty hunters make a nice collectable set of action figures but they are there to backup Vader hiring Fett to find the Falcon. They are also visually designed in such a way that any one of them could replace Fett at that dining table scene and still carry some sort of impact.
I really would be more wary of a set of films that went out of their way to avoid obvious connections with the prior films than worrying about universe shrinkage.
Tatooine only seems like the middle of nowhere to young Luke because he hasn't been anywhere else. There are probably Coruscant street urchins who dream of the sands of the Dune Sea and Tuskens riding Banthas beneath it's many moons and twin stars.
The Star Wars galaxy is essentially Earth shattered into many exotic environments. Part of the problem with AOTC is that it has two desert planets (one orange and one red) in the same movie. It would have made for a better narrative if both of those worlds were Tatooine (the droid armies explaining how the Jawas get to sell so many salvaged droids and why the locals don't like drinking with them). in terms of numbers you get two worlds but in terms of the richness of the environments in which the story is told we get short changed.
If there is a place for a small astro-droid that acts sort of like Artoo it makes more sense to put him in those scenes instead of a new droid (even if it does mean we meet less droids).
It might have been posted elsewhere but here is Roger Christian's take on that laser sword (his words okay :-P ) :
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-30273367
